The core comes clocked at 175MHz, which is the de-facto standard for all MX boards available on the market. The 4, 8MB chips of Samsung SDRAM are rated at 6ns. (166MHz). This is actually slower than what we saw on the Prophet, which was rated at 5.5ns. (OEM 166MHz).

The board itself is slightly larger in PCB size when compared to other MX cards. When we compared the board with Asus's own V7100 range of cards the V7100/2VID was quite bigger than the rest. This is due to the extra space needed to house the DVI adapter and the silicon image encoder chip.

TwinView

Asus was the first key player to release a card with the TwinView feature. Though companies like Suma had their products out as well none of these smaller fish have a market presence or reputation as strong as Asus.

A HD-15 connector and a DVI digital flat panel connector on the back panel of the board provide connections for the dual displays. Asus has also included a DVI->HD15 conversion connector which then allows the use of two HD-15 connections concurrently.

Connecting the second monitor is just a breeze, all you do is setup the adapter, connect the monitor to the adapter and then switch on the TwinView feature in the drivers. The adapter extends quite a bit from the rear, and you have to have enough space behind the casing to snap it on and keep it there.

The images that come through the adapter is as good as connecting the monitor directly to the HD-15 connector and gives crisp and clear image quality

In our Matrox review we pointed out that the new G450 has it's secondary RAMDAC integrated along side the 350Mhz primary RAMDAC in the processor core. This is one of the features that help in keeping the G450 smaller and compact in size than the G400.But to implement the TwinView feature, the cards require an external secondary RAMDAC to power the second display and this makes the MX TwinView cards cost slightly more and bigger in size.

Matrox's DualHead feature is in its second generation of cards now, though the TwinView technology is something brand new for Nvidia. So, a technology this new, cannot be & is still not in its prime yet. This is very evident when we compare the two technologies. The TwinView consists of two modes, Extended desktop and Clone, where as DualHead has Multidisplay, Clone, Zoom and DVDMAX operation modes. What the extended desktop does is simply extend your windows desktop into a larger one with two monitors. And clone mode gives two exact images on both monitors; Of what use this can be to a gamer right now is beyond me, but a useful feature for a business PC. Once you get use to a multi-monitor setup, it's truly hard to go back to a single monitor, hopefully we would see game developers getting into the rhythm and making multi-monitor specific games.

Windows 2000 won't give the full flexibility of the TwinHead feature. That is because Windows 2000 won't allow setting independent resolutions and refresh rates to two monitors from a single video card. Therefore both displays will have to have the same resolution. But I didn't have any problems with Win 98 and ME. The same problem exists for the Matrox G450.

The TwinView feature in Clone mode. Pretty simple to figure out but cannot beat what DualHead has to offer.

The best Double monitor support technology available in the market today. Has Options like DVDMax , DualHead Zoom (used to zoom in to specific areas on the primary display) and Matrox's Powerdesk setup.